Season of Terror

The Espinosas in Central Colorado, March–October 1863

By Charels F. Price

Publication Year: 2013

Season of Terror is the first book-length treatment of the little-known true story of the Espinosas—serial murderers with a mission to kill every Anglo in Civil War–era Colorado Territory—and the men that brought them down.

For eight months during the spring and fall of 1863, brothers Felipe Nerio and José Vivián Espinosa and their young nephew, José Vincente, New Mexico–born Hispanos, killed and mutilated an estimated thirty-two victims before their rampage came to a bloody end. Their motives were obscure, although they were members of the Penitentes, a lay Catholic brotherhood devoted to self-torture in emulation of the sufferings of Christ, and some suppose they believed themselves inspired by the Virgin Mary to commit their slaughters.

Until now, the story of their rampage has been recounted as lurid melodrama or ignored by academic historians. Featuring a fascinating array of frontier characters, Season of Terror exposes this neglected truth about Colorado’s past and examines the ethnic, religious, political, military, and moral complexity of the controversy that began as a regional incident but eventually demanded the attention of President Lincoln.

Cover

Contents

Figures

Foreword

Season of Terror springs from the intersection of two
obsessions. The first emerged early in 1863 when two
Espinosa brothers, Felipe Nerio and José Vivián of
San Rafael, a village near Conejos in Colorado’s San
Luís Valley, launched a vendetta that in eight months
led to the murder of perhaps as many as thirty-two
Anglo-Americans ...

Acknowledgments

I am deeply indebted to many people who helped me
prepare this book. Foremost among them is my wife,
Ruth, who not only tolerated my years-long obsession
with the Espinosas but even came to share it, ending
by materially assisting in the research; it was she who
discovered the whereabouts of the Ethan W. Eaton
papers, ...

Introduction

The “year mentioned” was 1863. The place was the
newly organized Territory of Colorado. The inexplicable
carnage lasted eight months. No one knows how
many were murdered; the generally accepted count
is ten or eleven but the killers themselves boasted
of having slain thirty-two, and such a number is far
from implausible. ...

1. “Alarming Intelligence and Intense Excitement”: First Murders in the Pike’s Peak Country

That year, spring came early to the Front Range of
the Rockies and to the great cleft in the mountains
to the south where the Arkansas River broke out onto
the plains. While frosts were still common at night,
by the middle of March the weather had warmed and
the grass had started and some of it was standing an
inch or two high. ...

2. “Most Horrible and Fiendish Murders”: The Bleeding of South Park Begins

Remembering his entrance into South Park at the
height of its first frenzied gold rush in 1859, a prospector
from Kentucky named Daniel Ellis Conner later
gave a somewhat prosaic description, calling it “a fine,
grassy, grazing country in the summer and perhaps
forty miles across it. ...

3. “There Has Been Considerable Excitement”: The First Colorado Cavalry Steps In

As reports of the five unexplained murders in the
Pike’s Peak country and South Park spread throughout
Colorado, speculation on the identity of the killers
tended to center on two theories: either they were
guerrillas or they were jayhawkers. The early suspicion
by the men at Saw Mill Gulch that Indians might
have been responsible ...

4. “The People Are Scared Nearly to Death Here”: The Murderers Strike at the Vitals of South Park

The gold camp of Montgomery, home to “Dornick,”
the garrulous correspondent of the Weekly Commonwealth,
lay in a high valley dominated by the rugged
mass of a peak in the Snowy Range that residents had
named Mount Lincoln. The settlement lay at the foot
of Hoosier Pass, which crosses the Continental Divide
toward Breckenridge, ...

5. “Fallen into the Hands of Hard Men in an Evil Hour”: The Lynching of Baxter

John McCannon of Frying Pan Gulch1 regarded himself
as a leader of men. It was an opinion that may
well have been justified. When he first appears in the
historical record of Colorado Territory he already
seems to have carried the title Captain, a rank he may
have earned while supporting the antislavery side ...

6. “Glorious News! The Mysterious Murders Unraveled at Last”: One of the Slayers Slain

After amusing themselves by lynching Baxter and
repeatedly stretching the necks of Snyder and possibly
another innocent victim, “Commandant” Wilson’s
squad of the California Gulch posse “then scouted
through the country as far northeast as Deer Creek,
within forty-five miles of Denver.”1 ...

7. “Desperate and Lawless Bravos”: The Brothers Espinosa

On a bitterly cold Thursday, January 15, 1863, a detachment
of ten soldiers of Company D, First New Mexico
Cavalry, under the command of Second Lieutenant
Nicholas Hodt, clattered into the Hispano plaza of
San Rafael on the Río Conejos near the border separating
Colorado Territory from the Territory of New
Mexico. ...

8. “Revenge for the Infamies Committed Against Our Families”: Serial Murder as Vendetta

In his abortive attack on the Espinosa home, Lieutenant
Hodt had set fire to their dwelling. Tom Tobin
remembered it as a house of logs,1 perhaps a rude
affair called a fuerte by the inhabitants of the San
Luís Valley,2 but more probably the typical Hispano
jacal made of adobe mud packed around a frame
of varillas, ...

9. “Malicious Interference was the Cause”: The Scapegoating of Captain E. Wayne Eaton

The next victim of the Espinosas wasn’t a miner or
a sawmill owner or a mail-station operator. Nor was
he a mule rancher on his way home from testifying
in court. He was a soldier. Though he wasn’t a fatality,
he did receive a severe wound—not a physical one
but an injury to his good name, ...

10. “Times Have Become Quiet Again”: Panic Recedes in South Park but Murder Moves Elsewhere

Euphoria spread throughout central Colorado in
the wake of the killing of Vivián Espinosa. John
McCannon’s possemen basked in a general glow of
gratitude. Wrote an editorialist of the Rocky Mountain
News Weekly: ...

11. “Ready for Any Duty, Untiring, and Full of Energy”: Samuel F. Tappan Takes Up the Hunt for the Espinosas

The summer of 1863,” wrote Frank Hall, early Colorado
legislator and later historian, “was marked by a
protracted drouth which dried up the streams, and
prevented growth of crops in the limited area then
cultivated.” Then, “[e]arlier than usual, about the
middle of October, ...

12. “If This Woman Is Found Dead, Tell the People the Espinosas of the Conejos Killed Her”: The Attack on Philbrook and Dolores Sánches

In 1863 the settlement of Trinidad in vast Huerfano
County on the plains east of the Sangre de Cristo
Mountains was only about three years old.1 It consisted
of a huddle of adobes and picket houses2 mainly
on the south bank of a stream French trappers called
the Purgatoire (Purgatory) ...

13. “I Drew His Head Back over a Fallen Tree and Cut It Off ”: Tom Tobin Ends the Terror

Tom Tobin was a man in the mythic mold of his friend
Kit Carson, a frontier type even then beginning to
pass from the scene. Mountain man, trapper, whiskey
trader, and Indian scout, Tobin, like Carson, was a
living legend if on a smaller scale than the universally
famed and beloved Carson. ...

14. “The Brightest Success Rewarded Them for Their Toils”: Tobin Brings in the Heads

There are almost as many accounts of the delivery
of the Espinosas’ heads to Colonel Tappan as there
were people who participated in the event or claimed
to have witnessed it. A point of general agreement,
with one exception, was that Tom Tobin and Lieutenant
Baldwin’s reduced detachment1 returned to
Fort Garland ...

15. “Who Is There to Gather the History of This Wretch?”: The Espinosas Remembered

The “Terrible Espinosas” were not soon forgotten.
Like a recurring nightmare, the memory of their
bloody onslaught came back again and again to the
people of Colorado Territory who had suffered the
contagion of dread the brothers and their nephew
had unleashed. ...

16. “Times with Me Have Sadly Changed”: Destinies

On the day after Christmas in the first year of the
twentieth century, an elderly Tom Tobin persuaded
a friend1 to write a letter for him to the Honorable
George L. Shoup, senator from Idaho, in Washington,
DC. ...

Appendix A: Location of the Death Site of Vivián Espinosa: Alternative Theories

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